There’s an affliction infecting corporate counsels, compliance officers, and IT teams. It’s called Archivalgia or, more colloquially, “Pain in the Archive.” Left unchecked, Archivalgia can do a world of damage. As with most diseases, recognizing the symptoms is crucial to treating the problem. Unfortunately, these symptoms are often mistaken for signs of other ailments. Here’s what to watch for:

ROI Vertigo

ROI Vertigo – the dizziness that occurs when costs overtake benefits – is both the hardest symptom to detect and the most damaging. Look for recurring costs that come with running archaic on-premises archiving platforms: frequent software upgrades, disruptive hardware refreshes, and painful storage expansions. Watch out for labor-intensive administration too. When the time spent maintaining your archiving solution eats into time you should be spending innovating or building competitive differentiation, seek professional help.

Poor Mobility

Mobility problems – usually caused by aging legacy platforms, but increasingly caused by poorly-designed cloud offerings – constrain workflows or reduce productivity. In today’s iPhone and Android-enabled business world, a mobile workforce is a healthy, productive workforce. Email is your organization’s lifeblood, the essence of insight, collaboration, and process efficiency. Anytime, anywhere access to email archives facilitates a healthy circulation of ideas and fewer tickets for your busy IT admins.

Search Sluggishness

Where productivity is concerned, search speed goes hand-in-hand with mobility. If you're searching administrators or your end users experience search times in hours or even days, more serious problems could soon follow. These include weak responses to legal challenges, compliance audit fatigue, and a rash of trouble tickets.

E-Discovery Dysfunction

Speaking of poor responses, it’s time we all got past the stigma of e-discovery dysfunction. While E-Discovery Dysfunction (EDD is nobody’s idea of a good time, neither is it a personal failing or evidence of a mid-career crisis. Aging archiving platforms often cause e-discovery searches to peter out under legal or compliance pressures. Thankfully, modern science can help. The right archiving platform – developed and optimized for the cloud – can restore youthful e-discovery vigor, and satisfy business partners both upstream and down.

Irritable Admin Syndrome

Also known as IAS, Irritable Admin Syndrome is the number one complaint among organizations suffering from Archivalgia. The trouble is that IAS can be caused by several different underlying ailments (including Persistent Irascible Temperament Ailment, or PITA). Given the rampant spread of Archivalgia, however, business health experts recommend that all organizations experiencing IAS review their archiving operations as soon as possible, to avoid permanent damage.

Obsolete architectures, resource silos, and development dead-ends are all leading causes of pain in the archive. Don’t hesitate to seek true cloud archiving relief should any of these symptoms arise.

Download The Changing Shape of Enterprise Information Archiving video, featuring Alan Dayley, a Research Director covering information governance, archiving, and storage management software at Gartner, as well as yours truly, the video looks at Enterprise Information Archiving, its past, and the factors shaping its future.

Want more great articles like this?Subscribe to our blog.

Get all the latest news, tips and articles delivered right to your inbox